Roughly two-thirds of the highest-paying and fastest-growing jobs in fields like design and marketing now demand computer science skills, according to a new report from Burning Glass Technologies and Oracle Academy.

In roles across the job market—design, engineering and production, marketing, and data analysis—employers are requesting skills in coding and data analysis, according to the report, “Rebooting Jobs: How Computer Science Skills Spread in the Job Market.” The report, based on Burning Glass’s analysis of more than 100 million job postings between 2014-16, also examines skills in demand for programming/information technology roles as a benchmark.

“Living wage jobs in the future will require some level of computer science knowledge,” saysAlison Derbenwick Miller, vice president of Oracle Academy. “This shows that computer science education is vital to future earnings, and an important equity issue.”

Key findings include:

  • Some 65% of the fastest-growing skills in the five fields examined, such as machine learning, Python, Apache Hadoop, and data visualization, are computer-science related.
  • Nearly as many (62%) of the highest-paying skills in these fields are computer-science related.
  • Yet only 18% of these positions specifically ask for a computer science degree (although most do require a bachelor’s degree).

These roles are “hybrid jobs,” that demand a mix of skills skills from different domains. Marketers, for example, increasingly rely on “big data” analytics to manage their campaigns, while an increasing number of engineers need to work with robotics and systems engineering. In some fields, such as engineering, it is common for students to take computer science classes, but in others it is not.

“Given this trend toward hybrid jobs, taking computer science courses is a wise career decision regardless of a student’s career interest,” Miller said.

 http://burning-glass.com/rebooting-jobs-computer-science-skills.